


Amarantus

by paperiuni



Series: Ash and Salt [5]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Study, Drama, Families of Choice, Family, Gen, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 17:37:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4714583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Bull's forays into this part of Dorian’s life have long been barefoot steps into a hallowed hall, silent and twilit and layered with shadows.</i>
</p><p>Or, Bull meets the parent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Amarantus

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thanks to Kris, loveliest of first readers, for invaluable commentary and cheering. ♥
> 
> *
> 
> I'm afraid this is a terribly self-indulgent story. It exists because I found I wasn't done with Dorian and his mother, and I wanted to say more about Bull and that matter. It'll work better if you've read _[House of Ash and Salt](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3488486)_ , but if you don't mind coming in in the middle, it'll stand as a futurefic.
> 
> I started this 'verse before Dorian's mother had a canon name, and now I can't picture my version with another name. Thus, she remains Tamasin in these stories.
> 
> *
> 
>  **Content Note** : This fic references miscarriage (not graphically), as well as Dorian's copious family issues.

_Your children are not your children._  
_They are the sons and daughters_  
_of Life's longing for itself._  
_They come through you but not from you,_  
_and though they are with you_  
_yet they belong not to you._  


\-- Kahlil Gibran

* * *

"You don't have to come," Dorian says for the second time since they disembarked into the bustle of Cumberland harbour.

To Bull's right scarf-headed sailors wrestle bales of cloth and barrels of fruit up the gangplank of a deep-swimming merchant ship. The stink of fish ripening in the autumn sun is carried away by the breeze that dances the banners of Orlesian lords and the flags of Marches cities in the swaying mast-tops.

The wonders of the port seem lost on Dorian today, even after summer months spent mostly in Fereldan wilderness. Bull circles past a pile of chests, redolent of anise, cloves and cardamom, and guarded by three bristling mercenaries in faded blue sashes.

He puts a hand on Dorian's back and feels the sigh that fills and flattens his lungs. Dorian lets himself be led to an alley crammed between a shoemaker's shop and a warehouse.

"You want me to hang back, just say it."

"I don't--" Dorian starts at once, then sniffs at his sleeve. "Another moment in this stench and it'll never leave my clothes."

"A little _eau du port_ won't ruin you if the sea voyage didn't." Bull allows them both that repartee; the reason for Dorian's disquiet stirs his own misgivings, too. "Come on. Inn, bath, late lunch. Then conquer the rest."

"One battle at a time. As you say." 

Dorian permits himself to lean against Bull for a moment. It’s a conscious effort, but it seems to work; Bull strokes his thumb along the back of Dorian’s neck and feels him relax.

It’s been four years, and Bull knows his forays into this part of Dorian’s life have long been barefoot steps into a hallowed hall, silent and twilit and layered with shadows. In that time the letters have come steadily every other month. Dorian answers them posthaste, cloistering himself at his desk or the garden for hours until he's done.

Bull contented himself with what Dorian would tell him. Last winter, Dorian came to their room one night, a streak of drying ink on his cheek and a long strip of rolled-up letter in his hand.

 _She's planning a journey south next summer,_ he breathed out as soon as the door was shut. _She'll be in Cumberland in Kingsway or so._

Bull set aside his whittling--he remembers the smell of dry pine shavings--and said, because what the fuck else was he going to say, _You'll be there, too, right?_

And Dorian said, _Yes, of course. I wrote her so. But, in so many words, I’d like to know if I’ll be going alone._

Which was how Bull found out that Dorian had divulged his existence to his mother.

* * *

Dorian changes his clothes three times. He'd probably keep going if the bottom of the travel chest didn't eventually gape empty under the articles discarded onto the bed one after the other.

"She hasn't seen you in half a decade," Bull says at last. "First thing she's gonna do probably won't be to assess your outfit."

" _You_ have never met her," Dorian begins. Then he halts, as if realising that's about to stop being true, and fixes the laces of his snowy linen shirt until the collar lies at an immaculate line. His attire has lost a lot of its Tevinter frills--Skyhold's seamstresses are an unyielding sort--but he could be calling at a grand soirée of the College of Magi and not rouse an askance look.

The last thing he does is look Bull over, adjust his eyepatch, find a spot on his pauldron and scrub a disagreeable thumb against it. The light from the window is full and golden. Dorian sent a runner to say they'd be at her inn at the evening bell, and a reply came in the affirmative, written in tall letters on a piece of fine rice paper.

They emerge into the thinning crowds. The day draws to an end: the taverns and street kitchens do a brisk business after dark, but most merchants and craftsmen are closing their shops. Bull feels the absence of the greataxe on his back, but knows he doesn't miss the weapon's weight so much as the sense of comfort it brings. It's the same way Dorian looks a touch naked without his staff. They still have to be ready for a fight so much of the time.

He tries to tell himself _this_ isn't a battle. Despite Dorian's repeat offers to give him an escape route, Dorian drifts close to nudge Bull's arm with his shoulder too often for it to be accidental.

Together, then.

The inn is an ancient affair, once a pilgrim hospice for the Chantry of Our Lady of the People, which sits on its high green hill to the northwest of the harbour. Faded murals of Andraste's life decorate the chalk-daubed walls. This doesn't seem to have bothered their visitor--if Bull can call her that, considering he and Dorian crossed the Waking Sea to meet her.

Dorian speaks to an elf woman in the entry hall, a sturdy copper ring of keys in her sash attesting to her station. She squints at Bull, but sends a serving boy to lead them across the courtyard at the front, through a wrought-iron gate, and into a garden tucked between the main building and the stables on the other side of the courtyard.

Bull smells crystal grace and embrium at once. The gate is hemmed by an aged, many-tendriled vine of arbour blessing that someone's tended with loving care. A path shaped with hewn cobblestones leads past a few elms and a hackberry tree hanging with dark fruit, and onto a patio laid of the same stones.

A woman sits in a wickerwork chair under a stone post, with a nook for a lantern at the top. Her head is bent over a book, and her braided hair is black, strewn thickly with grey. She's wearing blue.

Bull catches hold of Dorian's wrist. "I'll wait here." He nods at the courtyard.

"And appreciate the devotional art on the walls while I--"

"It'll be educational." Dorian knows the same thing Bull does, but his mind's too thronged right now. "Four years. Take a moment with her."

Slowly, Dorian deflates. "You're right." Then, in an undertone, "I love you."

"I know," Bull says, and points Dorian gently to the gate by the shoulder.

* * *

He meant to move over to where the figure of Andraste, her hair a mere red smear after centuries of rain, snow and worshipful fingers upon it, is leaning down to welcome a kneeling Shartan. With his horns, peering discreetly over gate or wall is a bit of a problem.

He stays standing by the gate as Dorian walks down the path, his soft boots dull on the stones. His mother looks up, too sudden for the movement to be studied, and sets the book down. Dorian starts some blithe remark, so airy that even Bull's ears don't catch it at this distance, other than to tell he's speaking in Tevene rather than in the more clipped Common.

It's like a shadow play: two people trying to fill the space between them, spanned only by long letters, paper and ink. Dorian's small, abortive reach, cut by a shake of his head, the sound of his laugh. She doesn't laugh in answer where Bull would have.

Her hands curve carefully to Dorian's cheeks, and Bull sees rather than hears a sigh well from him. The clutch of his arm is sudden, as if not entirely within his will. She's not slight, but shorter by nearly a head; she folds into the embrace until all that can be seen of her past Dorian's frame is the crown of her dark head.

Bull moves away then.

He's been held that way. By Dorian, for the most part. By a friend or two, upon a late reunion. There's a space there that belongs to the simple, heartfelt relief at the presence of someone long missed. It's not for him, not this time.

A stablehand leads a saddled horse across the courtyard to a departing patron. The wind rustles a whirl of early fallen leaves, trailing them through the sand drifted atop the cobbles.

He's stuck beside Andraste and Shartan, his thoughts as loose as the leaves, when the gate sounds. The shadows have moved a fraction, but the time might've been short or long.

"Mother," Dorian says, using the Tevene word and going on in Common, "this is..."

She steps through the open gate and around her son. Bull didn't gauge her tall; she's sturdy of leg and wide of hip, and her stance suggests it'd take dwarven engineering to budge her from her footings.

His first thought is, _She looks nothing like Dorian._

Her watery blue eyes take quick, efficient stock of him. "You are not mythical, after all, then. The way Dorian speaks of you, I wondered sometimes."

There's no derision in her voice, only parched appraisal. At distance, even wrapped in Dorian's arms, she seemed more like an idea than a--a woman, flesh and blood and breath.

Fuck, where's a bad joke when he needs one? If he cracks into levity now, Dorian _will_ stuff a fireball down his throat.

"Oh, he's quite real," Dorian cuts in. "Indeed. And this is my illustrious mother, Lady Tamasin of House Valera of Vol Dorma, present head of what's left of House Pavus, and so on."

Exasperation. Seems to work like a charm. Bull scrambles to the occasion.

"Ma'am." Briefly he pictures Vivienne, long returned to the intricacies of the Great Game, and finds support in the mental image of her steel and wit. "Iron Bull, Captain of the Bull's Chargers, lately of Ferelden. At your service."

Tamasin affords him an unsmiling nod. "There is a degree of fame attached to your name, especially here in Nevarra."

Dorian breaks into rapid Tevene, his Qarinian accent surging to the fore, and Bull swears she nearly rolls her eyes. "Of course I made inquiries. What did you expect?"

"I wonder." Dorian sighs. "That you might ask _me_ and not whatever purveyors of illicit information that..."

"I sent letters to a few friends. I've hardly consorted with any foreign lowlives here, as you seem eager to suggest."

"Might've got the best tidbits that way," Bull says before the conversation is derailed into a family dispute.

He had a few restless nights on the trip. Dorian painted him a vivid verbal picture of her, but it pales when she stands here in the dusty courtyard.

It doesn't seem to bother her in the least that she needs to angle up and up to meet his eye. "You have the good word of a few respectable families on your side."

"Not like the Inquisition would've kept me on this long if I wasn't good." Humility is a virtue; so is honesty. How frank have her sources been with her? He thinks back to decade-old jobs and tries to remember how many of them included more than martial services rendered.

Nobody's saying it aloud, and Bull won't start--he likes his head where it is--but she can't have any illusions about that Dorian is fucking him. Not only that, either; that Dorian regards Bull highly enough to have brought him here, to his mother, to the only blood family he's got left.

"I have no doubt." Tamasin makes a commanding little flick of her hand. Her fingers are bony and narrow, rubbed smooth with scented salve. "Walk with me a while, if you please."

Dorian takes a step, only to be brought short by her hand. "I did not mean you."

It's a rebuke, but not an unkind one. Bull's distantly impressed by her nuance, even as his eye veers to seek Dorian's over her head. If she wants a private talk, he can handle her, but not without Dorian's assent.

"Well, if you have no need of me, I'll avail myself of your book, _mater cara_." Dorian's shoulders settle into an admirably relaxed angle.

"Won't be long," Bull says, a hint of an edge in the words. Dorian smiles without smiling, the corners of his eyes cinching, enough for Bull to read it. Hesitation and gratitude both gleam there.

Tamasin falls into step beside Bull. The top of her head would just touch his pauldron if she stood close enough for it. She pulls her fine wool shawl closer around her shoulders as she leads him towards the front gate of the inn.

He closes the weatherbeaten, oaken half of the gate behind them. "Around the compound, hm?"

"It will do. I'd rather have a few words without Dorian hovering over each of them."

She can't be more than half his weight. Dorian speaks of her magical talent with approval, which means that staff or other focus or no, she's twice as dangerous as him. He examines that fact and puts it away with all the rest.

"Can't say I'm not a bit surprised." Pacing himself with loose, slow strides so she can keep up, Bull follows the outer wall of the compound in the thickening twilight.

"What exactly is it that surprises you, Iron Bull?"

He guesses he could make a list. Her very presence here would be a start: it's three weeks of hard riding from Qarinus, a little less than that by ship, and she must've seen sixty winters pass.

"He didn't take well to the last parent that came to see him." It's a low blow--Bull knows that and strikes it anyway.

"My husband is four years dead. I'm sure Dorian mourned him more deeply than I ever did."

It's not a thing Bull likes to remember, those first raw, ragged months after Dorian's return from Tevinter. He breathed in dismay and relief to hear Sera tell of Dorian's drunken funeral rites, but after that, Dorian seldom even hinted at the topic of his father.

"You do know that if he asks, I'll tell him anything you said."

When a soft, chafing sound bursts from her, it takes him a beat to understand that it's laughter. "I hope you'll take my meaning when I say I'd expect no less. I was married for thirty years."

"Good. Just so we're on the same page here." There's probably no way this could be a normal conversation between two people who've just met. Dorian is an indelible link between them.

"We seem to be." She's regained her unmarred composure. "So, may I tell you anything else, to set your mind at ease?"

As if he's the one that needs reassurance, he thinks. Her only son chose exile and took a qunari as his lover. If that's the right word. Bull is so used to Dorian being _there_ , sure as the sunrise, but that's not a brisk way of defining the matter for others.

On the other hand, if he put his mind to it, he could find plenty to blame her for.

They stroll up towards the foot of the chantry hill, which has been left to grow wild. The ancient oaks shimmer with deep shades of gold, autumn brushing its fingers across their foliage. Cicadas thrum in the grass creeping up to the side of the street. He remembers learning how humans, when they age, can no longer hear the sound.

"Qunari don't have families," he says. "Not the way you think of them. I figured out that word when they sent me out of Par Vollen."

"Dorian tells me you are an outcast. You don't have to hedge around that."

"Anything you _want_ me to hedge around?" he retorts before he can quite weigh that.

Her pointed silence is, probably, answer enough. He switches back towards his topic. "Yeah. He told me some things about you, too, back when we first met."

She waits. He knows the tone of her quiet: he's used it often enough himself, to pull out answers that need their time.

"Look. I can tell you that under the Qun, any tamassran doing to her charges what you tried to do to him would be sent to re-education herself. You find the role that fits the person, not... the other way around."

It could never be an ordinary talk. They're strangers, but they know too much about each other.

"You're not suggesting the priesthood uses blood magic to enforce compliance, are you?" Fuck. He could almost buy that she's unruffled, if not for a flicker of muscle at her jaw.

Bull doesn't laugh; the noise he makes is coarse and unmerry. It's still meant to slacken the tension, and the quick swerve of her head to the side signals her agreement.

"There's earthier ways," he says.

"It is said your people waste nothing." She shifts her long, single braid over her shoulder to drape down her front. "I know what _qamek_ is. I've also been told that you chose your mercenaries over your people when cornered on the matter."

Bull sort of hopes Dorian has a cipher worked out for all that correspondence, even with the letters moving along Inquisition channels most of the way. The choice is an old one, worn deep into his memory. He's cold and glad all at once.

"I chose my family." He puts a stress on the word, borrowing its meaning and its strength, shaping the syllables like gouges into wood.

Tamasin nods. They've halted; she begins walking again, and he follows. The heart of the city spreads torchlit below them, the smoke of its hearths and kitchen fires undulating into the air.

At length she says, "You may think me terrible. Dorian certainly used to."

He almost replies, _That an assumption or a permission?_ before she severs his train of thought with, "Be that as it may, he is my only son, and he loves you."

"Hah." The sound's thin, coming from his mouth. His inhalation rasps. "Yeah, he likes to do that, too. Go for the jugular."

"He has the wits for it, but not quite the will." Tamasin crooks her head. The single earring--twin to the one Dorian keeps in the corner of his desk drawer--in her left ear chinks faintly. "Dorian would shake you in warning and let you go. He never learned how to bite down. Which, I suppose, is why we are here at all."

"I guess." Humans are as fond of imagining the future as they are of dragging the past in their wake. Bull's come to understand more of that than he ever wanted. Even so, he's not sure he could've pictured this: being lectured on the quality of mercy by the mother of--of the man he'll spend the rest of his life with, if he only can.

He needs a more succinct term for Dorian.

"Don't get me wrong," he says. "That's not a weakness. I know a damn lot of people who put their lives on the line day after day to keep people safe. And having said that, Dorian's the bravest person I know."

He's treated to the sight of bemusement flitting over her features. Her bones may be too steep and strong to fit the clean-lined Tevinter ideal of female beauty, but Bull's starting to see his initial appraisal wasn't quite on point: she's striking in a way reminiscent of Dorian.

 _Striking_ is probably a good word, in general.

"You paid a price for your choice, I'm sure." Her eyes linger on her slippers, shifting into view from under her skirts on each step. "As did Dorian. As did his father and I."

He could interrupt her with another acid remark. Several line up in his head as soon as the thought occurs to him.

"He was our one hope." The sounds of their steps blend together: the thud and snap of his boots and his brace, the scuff of her hide-soled slippers. Bull thinks of Dorian, waiting in the garden, probably not reading a word of whatever volume Tamasin left on her chair.

After a moment he realises she hasn't continued, as if that oblique comment were enough. What does she want from him, this woman, peerlessly calm and hard as marble? He isn't sure what he could give. If it weren't for Dorian and his love, their paths never would've crossed.

He doesn't think she hates him. Another small, fanged surprise.

"You want to peel that back a bit?"

His previous puzzlement is mirrored in her upward glance.

"The part about hope."

"Do you have children, perhaps?" There's another streak of Dorian in her; never aim straight at your target. Bull knows a flanking manoeuvre when it's pointed at him.

"Not that I know." At least he can match her candour now. A memory or two touch him, as faraway as Par Vollen: a few times, he was summoned to couple with a fertile woman, after the tamassrans had read the lineages and measured the time. He never asked for their names--not for the things they were called among their own, their friends.

"I lost two before I had him." Tamasin's voice is wound with steel, a living thing rattling a cage. "He nearly killed me, being born. And I said, enough, not again." She breathes. "Women die in childbirth. More often so when they're not attended by Circle healers."

"He never mentioned that." In his way, Bull is inured to confessions. He's heard many, some gasped in agony, others muttered in passion, yet others spoken in the bitter hours before dawn over a flat ale or a banked fire.

"Dorian?" A pause forms. "He doesn't know. Best that a living son didn't yearn after a dead brother."

 _If he asks, I'll tell him anything you said._ He meant it if not as a threat, then as a warning.

Bull doesn't even need to close his eye to see Dorian going to her down the garden path, fearful and hopeful. Tamasin held his face in her hands like a blessing.

"I'm not here to judge you," he offers. "That what you expected?"

Tucking her hands under her arms, defiant or defensive, she turns a corner. The street curves back towards the front gate of the inn.

"I... Very well." She sighs. "In truth, I did come to judge _you_. It took Dorian three letters to work up from 'there's someone' to 'I am hopelessly smitten with a qunari mercenary'."

"Damn." He worries at his cheek with his teeth, because she's too short to see it. "I guess that's not direct quote."

Her words snap like the jaws of a phoenix. He's begun to understand just how she's held her precarious advantage in the power games of Tevinter nobility.

"Oh, he was rather more convoluted about it. Which was how I could tell it was important."

That's elementary, of course--the dearest secrets are always clutched closest to your chest. Three letters, she says. Dorian kept the inching conversation-by-correspondence to himself for months, then.

Bull is going to have a few words with him when they're alone again.

"I get it," he says. "He gets it. This isn't what you wanted for him."

"Dorian and I haven't been aligned on that matter since he was old enough to have opinions. He listened to his father for much longer than he ever did to me."

"Funny. He tells a pretty different story."

"I didn't say that stopped me from telling him what I thought was best, did I?"

He has no ready comparison. Even when he twisted a rule to have a go at his peers or his teachers, in the end he was an obedient child. Dorian rebelled much louder and earlier.

"Uh, since we're being forthcoming now..." Amusement shades his voice as he realises one of them has slowed their pace as they draw closer to the inn gate, and the other's taken their cue from the first.

"Yes?" Tamasin's tone nearly suggests curiosity.

"That's not why you're here? To tell him what you think." By now he's winging it. The way Dorian spoke of his mother, he expected much of what he sees: her towering will, her sheer imperious sense of self. The flashes of what seems to be honest, wary fascination are the part that resists quick qualification.

"You're ready to protect him from me, I take it," she says pithily.

"He fights his own battles." Bull holds down the mock shrug that wants to shift his shoulders. "I'm not his damn keeper." That comes out with more force than he meant, a shining vein of vitriol in it.

The look she gives him intimates that she can tell he slipped there. "He's fought some of them all his life, Iron Bull."

 _And whose fault is that?_ is on the tip of his tongue, but he's sidetracked by the sudden, internal argument brewing in his head. He'll have Dorian's back in any fight that meets them; he'll shore him up after any blow he can't avoid. But there are pains beyond those of steel and spell.

Dorian's never suffered others, even those he loves, to champion him. It gets too close to defence turning into smothering, guidance into dictation.

Then she says, "And I'd be sorry for that if I thought it did any good now. I've regretted many things, and regret has done very little for me."

He sinks his focus into that instead. Contrition as a trade. Another moment when he finds similarity in the strangest of places: the Qun has little use for the concept of remorse. If you fail in your task, you're reassigned. If you fail a friend, you admit your wrong and do better. The mistake never lingers--unless they pile up until they're a mountain on your back.

She doesn't seem very bowed by hers.

"Don't know about that," he says. "It comes in useful when you don't want to repeat the stupid shit you've done."

Holding herself rigid, the angle of her shoulders hard, she looks dead ahead. "He is not the son I thought I'd have, and I am not the mother he deserves. Do you think I should spurn this chance to be something to him, while we both still live?"

Dorian survived the Breach and the ensuing upheaval, sometimes by the skin of his teeth, as did all of them in the Inquisitor's company. His mother's lived through Tevinter politics, seemingly on her own, since the death of her husband. When weighed and measured, neither is a mean feat.

Inevitably, because the mind moves in such circles, Bull pictures another woman, in simple linen skirts, her feet thick with dust, her white hair always done in a nest of braids. No Inquisition agent would make it to Qunandar; he'd never ask for it even if one could.

"Enough." Moving half a step past her, he tilts his eye at her stone-still face. "Dorian comes up now and he'll never let us out of his sight again."

She exhales in a burst of air. "I take your point. That is your answer, then?"

One by one, Bull shears the clinging tendrils of memory. Wherever she is, his old tamassran, it was elation Cole heard echoed in her. _He got away. He got away._ She didn't give birth to him, or bring him into the world, but she gave her wisdom and her steady hand, her comfort and her counsel.

"Now you're asking me to judge."

"To reckon," Tamasin says, her tone a little distant. "I could certainly sit in Qarinus and seethe. _Noli quaerere ex amantibus_ , perhaps. Dorian has had his moments at that."

 _Do not ask from lovers_ , that much he can glue together, but maybe his frown is a reprieve, because a wry expression nudges her mouth.

"Something they say in Vol Dorma. 'Ask not the way of lovers, for all they see is the beloved.' When one wants something badly enough, it blinds them to all else."

"Pretty way to put a harsh thing."

"True," she says. "There is one thing I want very much, though. I want him to be well, and I want him to be safe, no matter where in the world he is."

 _He got away._

He can never see his Tama again. Dorian's rewoven an old tie, letter by letter, over the years. Does that pain flow in the same shade from different fonts?

Bull's about to say something about moving on--the evening's edged over into darkness--when the gate opens twenty paces ahead of them, and Dorian lets it swing back on its hinges with a muffled thump.

"What a relief." Only the very ends of the words catch in his teeth. "Neither of you drowned the other in the harbour, after all."

"Do not be absurd." Tamasin rises to the moment, holding out a light hand for Dorian's somewhat distracted grip. His face eases when he nods at her, but his eyes wander to Bull over her shoulder.

"Yeah," Bull cuts in. "Most civil evening stroll I've had in ages." The quip is meant as a covert reassurance, and to his relief Dorian hears it, giving him the same swift, soft look he did earlier.

Before they left Skyhold--the night they had the greatest part of the conversation over who was even going--he told Dorian, _I'd never make you choose_. In the privacy of their quarters it seemed straightforward: they'd take a ship, Dorian would have a few days with her, however long the season and her business allowed, and life would go on much as it had.

No plan survives the start of actual battle. The same seems to work for family reunions.

"I'll just--keep going," he adds. "We've been introduced. I guess it's time I gave you two some space."

The flicker of ambivalence on Dorian's face only fans Bull's unease. It's not that he dreads leaving them alone, any more than he did being alone with Tamasin. His conversation with her wound to an abrupt close, but he can let that settle. Getting a good grasp of her would take more than a single evening hour; he thinks, now, that he'll have that time.

"I'll be back by the midnight bell." Dorian points his words to Bull, releasing his mother's hand. "That is, don't wait up. There'll be time tomorrow."

Sometimes Dorian sounds entirely too much like him for comfort. He must know Bull won't get an eyeful of sleep before his return.

Tamasin diverts Bull from his contemplation of that. "I trust I will see you again." She does a damn fine job of at least sounding sincere. "Thank you."

"My pleasure." He nods smartly. "You have a good night."

She accepts that with a cant of her head, lifts her skirts and steps away far enough to let him and Dorian have a little room. Dorian's attire is as neat as ever, but a couple of his rings have been twisted askew by nervous fingers, the gemstones turned to his palm. Bull wants to touch him--and that's somehow inadequate, a shadow cast by the actual desire, whatever it is.

"All good," is what he says to Dorian, though, leaning down a notch lower than usual. "Details later."

"You can be sure of that, _kadan_ ," Dorian murmurs, the Qunlat low and intimate on his lips, like a secret passed between them, a caress in a word while his hands stay at his sides. If nothing else, Bull isn't alone in feeling out new footings.

He breaks away first, leaving Dorian to join Tamasin's still, waiting figure by the gate, and takes the long way around through the nighttime city to their inn.


End file.
